Ad buyers estimate major losses from Meta ad platform bugs
Harry Delmege’s Meta problem started in the middle of August.
Delmege, CMO of digital marketing agency MHI Media, was overseeing a campaign for a fashion brand and targeting would-be customers when all of a sudden, he says, the platform’s targeting tools appeared to flip: Instead of targeting younger audiences mostly on Instagram, Meta’s automated ad tools started targeting older, 65+ audiences mostly on Facebook.
Delmege still isn’t sure if the flip was intentional or a bug within Meta’s ad tools, he said. Either way, he said, the results weren’t great—few of the targeted users bought anything, and performance plummeted. Delmege estimated that the incident may have cost his client somewhere in the “high-five-figure” range.
“In times like this, it’s scary, because it can crush our business,” Delmege told Marketing Brew.
Delmege isn’t alone. Five other media buyers told Marketing Brew that they feel like Meta’s ad tools, which automate ad targeting across platforms including Facebook and Instagram, are broken and buggy. Whether it’s observing that ads didn’t load properly or seeing that daily budgets were blown through within hours, some buyers have come to expect issues as often as every other week, and told Marketing Brew that they find Meta’s support falls short.
A website maintained by Meta that tracks issues with Facebook Ads Manager has noted at least a dozen disruptions to the ad tools since Memorial Day, with four classified as “major disruptions.”
“That is a fundamental part of running ads on Meta today—you have to bake in that there will be bugs and there will be disruption,” said Andrew Foxwell, co-founder of the social media advisory firm Foxwell Digital and the manager of an advertising networking Slack channel where buyers commonly discuss issues on the platform.
Tom Channick, a spokesperson for Meta, told Marketing Brew in an email, “Our ads system is working as expected for the vast majority of advertisers—helping them reach their customers and grow their businesses,” adding that “we sometimes experience bugs as part of the normal software development process, and we take swift action to fix them.”
Separately, when asked about the specific issues described in this piece, spokesperson Kash Ayodele said an advertiser’s “individual performance is not reflective of any broader issues with our tools,” and that the company had “reduced the number of disruptions” year over year and from Q1 to Q2 2024.
Bogged down and buggy
While three buyers we spoke to said that the platform’s ad tools have seemed especially buggy since February, more high-profile problems affecting the platform’s advertising technology have made it into the headlines every couple of years. Ayodele pushed back on the notion that the platform has experienced an uptick in disruptions this year, telling us that “it would be inaccurate to report that advertisers are experiencing ‘more bugs and issues.’”
Advertisers continue to report issues, though you wouldn’t know it from Meta’s stock price. The company posted monster earnings in late July, which company executives largely credited to its heavy investments in AI.
“Over the long term, advertisers will basically just be able to tell us a business objective and a budget, and we’re going to go do the rest for them,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors.
Meta has built itself to be the world’s second-largest advertising platform by effectively matching advertisements with audiences, typically through lookalike audiences or campaigns targeted to user interests. In recent years, Meta has pushed advertisers toward more automated buying tools, like Advantage+, which the company claims work more effectively to target audiences. During the company’s Q2 earnings, CFO Susan Li cited a study “demonstrating 22% higher return on ad spend for US advertisers” using Advantage+ Shopping campaigns.
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Some buyers continue to report issues. David Herrmann, a freelance media buyer and consultant, told Marketing Brew that a June glitch affecting campaigns that included Meta Shops resulted in between $300,000 and $400,000 in potential losses across his portfolio of clients. (Marketing Brew was unable to independently verify these figures.)
“They’re just making so many changes to the platform that they’re just breaking it,” he said.
Ashvin Melwani, CMO and co-founder of supplement brand Obvi, told us he encountered an issue on Meta’s ad platform in March where the hourly spend on three campaigns nearly quadrupled in the last few hours of the same day, causing him to go over budget by $9,200. A few weeks later, a campaign that was spending roughly $280 an hour spent $6,000, he said.
“In a single hour, it wiped a whole day’s worth of profit,” he said.
Last month, Brad Ploch, co-owner of the agency WRK Marketing, posted on X about seeing a campaign on Meta go significantly over its daily budget, with most of the spend happening over the course of an hour. Other marketers chimed in, with several commiserating and sharing similar experiences in the replies.
Three buyers told Marketing Brew that Meta’s support team, a department that faced considerable cuts and layoffs during the company’s “Year of Efficiency” in 2023, has not been particularly helpful at finding solutions.
Filing a bug to Meta is “literally shouting into a void,” Barry Hott, a marketing consultant and owner of Hott Growth, said.
Ayodele told us that the company has made “a number of major improvements to our support systems” as part of a multi-year effort to “improve the account support we offer for all users.”
The challenges with the platform that buyers described mean that some are trying to avoid Meta’s AI-based ad tools when they can.
Delmege said that in some instances, he’s moved away from Meta’s Advantage+ AI advertising tool and instead manually restricts advertiser campaigns in an effort to get them to perform as they previously did on the platform.
Performance “is better, but only when you’re really trying to restrict it, which is completely against everything Facebook’s trying to build,” he told Marketing Brew.
Melwani, the marketer at Obvi, says he’s found success taking his budget elsewhere, turning to influencers on platforms like TikTok.
“I would rather get a couple million views from an influencer for 50 cents than try to get a couple million views on Facebook at $20 CPMs,” he said. “That’s where our mentality has gone.”
Other marketers, though, acknowledged that there are few other platforms to turn to.
“No matter what they do, they are still the best,” Herrmann said. “For the level of spend, there’s no other place to go but Meta, and that’s where Meta can kind of get away with these bugs—because we always come back.”
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